Irish Govt Announces New Approach to Primary Teaching

The Irish government is introducing a scheme that will transform primary teaching by turning regular school classrooms into operant conditioning chambers. According to Dept. of Education spokesman, Dr. Aibreáin Ó Amadain, “we are convinced that this is the most effective way to educate young minds.”

Dr. Ó Amadain continued,

We have found that the “Golden Age of Education” coincided with the use of corporal punishment in schools. In layman’s language, you have to “beat” the learning into the kids. Since that highly effective educational tool – the stick – was outlawed, we have noticed there’s been a decline in educational standards, ill-discipline in the classroom, obesity, poor hygiene, and a general growing slovenliness in schoolchildren. This is especially apparent in those so-called Millennials, with their PacMans and iThings, and whatnot.

So the Dept of Education had to find a way to return to the values and standards of the past without breaking the law too much.

Thanks to some probably legal and only slightly unethical research undertaken by the Faculty for Acquiring Knowledge and Education (FAKE), they discovered that they could use a Behaviorist approach to educate children while simultaneously instilling traditional values. Behaviorism is a “treatment” approach to education, based on the principles of operant conditioning, that replaces undesirable behaviors with more desirable ones through positive or negative reinforcement.

This approach is sometimes called Behavioral Understanding Learning Logic or BULL. The Department’s approach centers around completely immersing learners in this environment, what is called TOTAL BULL.

According to a statement released today:

We’ve already begun converting the classrooms of Ireland into Skinner boxes. As you know, traditional Skinner boxes are used to modify the behavior of animals such as rats. In accordance with BF Skinner’s directions, the classrooms will be sound-and light-proofed. Each rat student will have their own set of levers to operate, and a water and food pellet dispenser so that they will have sufficient sustenance – if they earn it.

He continued:

We feel that this approach will enable pupils to learn everything they need – pull levers, turn switches, eat pellets of nourishment, and so on – to fulfill their roles as cogs in the globalized industrial complex, ruled by a class of rich overlords, who we call the Zucktocracy.

Honours students will be ‘inspired’ by random and frequent busts of eardrum-shredding white noise and eyeball-bleeding variable strobe lighting to stimulate the prefrontal cortex. Most importantly, the floor will be electrified to dispense admonishment and correction to errant students.

There is an added benefit to the electrified floors – the schools reckon if they withdraw the Skinner Box seating modules, activate the floors at lunchtime, and leave them ‘live’ for half an hour or so, they can guarantee pupils will get plenty of exercise, certainly more than the lazy sods are getting at the moment, as they’ll have to repeatedly jump off the floor if they’re not to suffer the trauma of being subjected to a steady 5,000 volts of electrically-stimulated agony. In the pilot program, teachers controlling the Operant Conditioning Classrooms affectionately nicknamed this feature the River of Pain.

An Operant Conditioning Classroom. Note the high density of students, lack of teacher, and feeding pipe attached to each pupil.

With the current focus on digital learning, it may seem a retrograde step to focus so heavily on classroom-based teaching and education. However, there’s an online dimension too: all of the Operant Conditioning Classrooms are connected to the internet (and to the national electrical grid), which means that rather than having wasteful and expensive teachers in each classroom, the government can save money by having one teacher “command” multiple classrooms simultaneously via the web, inflicting pain stimulating education. This lean approach is expected to be much more efficient and economical than the previously-available ‘old skool’ method of teachers meting out hand-crafted, high impact educational interventions.

Truly, digital enablement is a wonderful thing.

Wrapping up his statement, Dr. Aibreáin Ó Amadain said that today, April 1st will be remembered as a special day. This new initiative is a major innovation in 21st Century pedagogy, he claimed, and he looks forward to other education authorities teaching TOTAL BULL in the future.